Like the old woman who swallowed the spider to catch the fly, Australian scientists are hoping the native meat ant will eat the cane toad, that was sent to swallow the beetle, that ate the sugar cane crop.

Reviled for its ugliness and feared because of its unstoppable invasion of the Australian landscape, the cane toad consistently rates as the most despised exotic pest, rivalled only by the feral cat.

"Nine out of 10 Australians put the cane toad in their top five ferals of concern," says Tony Peacock, professor of agriculture whose invasive species research centre in Canberra surveys public attitudes to exotic animals and plants.

Introduced in 1935 to combat the native beetle that was destroying sugar cane crops planted by European migrants, the cane toad has mutated into a perfect specimen of Australia's catastrophic environmental history.

Over the past 70 years, more than 100 indigenous species have disappeared or have been pushed to the edge of extinction including the yellow-footed rock wallaby, northern hairy-nosed wombat, grey nurse shark and green turtle. At least 157 more are on the critical list.

Largely confined to north-eastern Australia, until the 1980s the cane toad was largely viewed as a problem for Queenslanders, whose parochial and brutish reputations were enhanced by their attempts to club, squash and kill the hardy pest by any means, followed by their habit of racing the ugly creatures in the pub.

As the cane toad has pushed further west and south into other states – it now inhabits 20% of the continent – there is growing evidence that it is wiping out both the yellow spotted goanna, a large lizard, and the quoll, a cat-like carnivorous marsupial.

The poisonous glands behind the cane toad's head are so toxic that would-be predators die almost instantaneously. Freshwater crocodile corpses have been found floating with cane toads stuck in their jaws. However, the cane toad has failed its in mission and the native beetle continues to destroy crops.

Although loathed and hunted, the cane toad has become an uncontrollable force, spreading through the bush at an increasingly rapid clip, along with foxes, rabbits, wild dogs, goats, camels, brumbies, deer and buffalo, to name but a few of the hundreds of exotic species that dominate Australia.

It has fanned out from the sugar cane plantations to infest backyards, rainforests, and the world heritage listed Kakadu national park. It has even colonised coastal islands by swimming out on flood waters.

But now some scientists hope the Australian bush may be about to have its revenge.

"The basic idea is that rather than going for a high-risk strategy of bringing in a disease or a genetically modified virus, the meat ants, with a few million years of evolutionary advantage, are used to kill the toads," said Professor Rick Shine, whose study of the feral frogs and the native ants was recently published in the British journal Functional Ecology.

Shine admited that left to their instincts alone, the ants wouldn't do the job as they have done little to eat into the cane toad numbers in the areas where they already co-exist.

"It would be a question of encouraging them to forage at the water's edge where young toads are found," he said.

However, Australia's success with biological controls is limited to just two experiences, both with the rabbit.

Introduced so the landed gentry could hunt, the rabbit soon bred and spread so voraciously that not even the fox, imported to hunt the rabbits, could keep the numbers down.

As with the cane toad, the fox, once the hunter, became a hunted nuisance while the rabbit population exploded to around 600 million.

In 1950, the government sanctioned the release of the myxomatosis disease and cut the population to 100 million, but by 1991, genetic resistance had rebuilt the population to as much as 300 million, prompting a second disease, the calicivirus, to be released.

Professor Ian Lowe, an environmental scientist at Griffith University in Queensland, and president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the search for a magical biological bullet was absurd.

"The delusion that you can have effective biological control still seems very strong in Australia. People talk about managing environmental systems as if it's no more complex than managing a jam factory. We should have learned from the cane toad that the cure is often worse than the disease," he said.